Monday, July 7, 2008

BBN translates Chinese, through $5M DOD contract

By Mass High Tech Staff

BBN Technologies Corp. reports that it has been awarded $5 million in additional funding by the U.S. Department of Defense for a speech transcription program.

The DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency enlisted BBN Technologies for its Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. The initiative is designed to develop software to transcribe speech, translate both speech and text, and distill large volumes of speech and text in multiple languages with more than a 90 percent accuracy, company officials said.

In January, Cambridge-based BBN received $13 million to continue work on processing Arabic from both speech and text. Under the latest contract award, BBN will work in Chinese from both speech and text sources, officials said.

Founded in 1948, BBN is well-known for its role in the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. The company specializes in acoustic technology, speech recognition, secure computing and data mining.

In June, BBN Technologies acquired for an undisclosed amount Digital Force Technologies LLC, a San Diego, Calif.-based engineering firm.

BBN, which employs more than 700 workers, operates facilities in seven locations: Cambridge; Arlington, Va.; Columbia, Md.; Middletown, R.I.; San Diego; St. Louis Park, Minn.; and O’Fallon, Ill.